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Keeping you in the loop on some of the things happening around Apple this week.

Bear-market territory. Apple’s shares continued their downward slide, falling to a nine-month low of $505.75 in intraday trading today before closing at $527.68 on the Nasdaq. That’s a 25-percent drop from this year’s high of $705.07 in September, leaving it squarely in bear market territory. Why? Well, one reason is that investors, expecting a hike in the 15-percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends next year as part of a bi-partisan deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, are likely taking their money now to avoid paying higher taxes on their Apple gains next year. The sell-off has shaved billions off Apple’s market cap, driving it below $500 billion. Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital came out with a list of possible investor concerns, including the pressure on Apple’s profit margins due to higher manufacturing costs, competition with Android, Mapgate, and CEO Tim Cook’s recent management changes and product shortages as a sign of execution problems. His takeaway: “Apple’s shares are undervalued and worth buying…From a fundamental standpoint, we continue to view Apple as one of the clearest beneficiaries of the shift in computing toward mobile devices with the iPad and the iPhone.” We’ll see if investors agree in coming weeks.

Calling up the iPhone 5. Cook told analysts on the earnings call in October that demand for the iPhone 5 was “extremely robust,” that it was “in a significant state of backlog,” and that Apple was ramping up production and making progress in balancing supply and demand. Well, this week we saw a sign that Cook’s supply promise is coming true: Apple cut the wait time for the iPhone 5 on its website to “two to three weeks” after saying new orders would ship in from “three to four weeks” for nearly two months. The iPhone accounts for almost half of Apple’s revenue, which is why shortages are always a source of concern for investors and analysts. Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley is predicting sales of 50 million iPhones this quarter, while Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets predicts sales of 43 million units. Either one would top the current record of 37 million iPhones sold in the fourth quarter of 2011 thanks to the iPhone 4S.

Channeling ‘GoodFellas.’ Thieves nabbed about 3,600 iPad minis, valued at $1.5 million, from the same cargo building at JFK airport that was the site of the 1978 Lufthansa heist featured in Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” according to The New York Post. The crooks borrowed one of the airport’s forklifts to nab two pallets that had just arrived from China and load them into a truck. The caper does read like a movie script: “The crooks arrived at Building 261 around 11 p.m. in a white tractor trailer according to the sources. They pulled up to the side of the airport building that faces onto a street and has less security than the other side, which is accessible from the airport tarmac,” the Post said,. “Investigators, suspecting an inside job, have been questioning airport workers and given three of them polygraph tests.” Will Apple be able to track the tablets once they go online? I guess we’ll find out.

New directions. While Apple continues to work on improving the Maps app it released in iOS 6 to replace Google’s maps service on its mobile devices, Google is reportedly working on a new mapping app for the iPhone 5, according to the WSJ. You may remember that Google in June promised to update its app to offer iPhone users the same functionality it offers Android users, though Brian McClendon, head of Google maps, didn’t say at the time when that might be. We still don’t know -- there’s no word on when the new Google maps app will be submitted to the Apple iTunes store.

Legalities.Apple and HTC ended a two-year legal battle that started when Apple accused HTC of copying the iPhone – the first lawsuit in what Steve Jobs called a “thermonuclear war” against phone makers building Android phones. Their settlement includes a 10-year license agreement to cross-license each other’s patents. While financial terms weren’t disclosed, Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee estimates that Apple will get a licensing fee of $6 to $8 per phone from HTC, “which means about $180 to $280 million in annual revenue given the 30-35 million Android smart phones HTC will likely ship in 2013.” He adds that “this is apparently lower than the range that Apple initially proposed. But to put this in context, this compares to press reports indicating HTC pays MSFT $5 per phone running Android.One could argue that Microsoft has much less patents and intellectual property than AAPL in this space and so we think $6-$8 seems reasonable if not a relatively small price for HTC and others to pay to be able to sell a modern smart phone with touch screen.”

As to the big question -- whether Apple’s HTC settlement presages an end to patent hostilities with Samsung -- the answer is a big no. "It may be true that HTC may have agreed to pay 300 billion won (US$276 million) to Apple, but we don't intend to [negotiate] at all,” Shin Jong-kyun, head of Samsung's mobile and IT division, told reporters in Seoul, according to Yonhap News.

Woz worries about Microsoft. Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak said he was worried that Microsoft might be doing more innovation than Apple. And no, he’s not talking about Microsoft’s new Surface tablet competing against the iPad. Instead, he talked about Microsoft’s efforts with technology that makes simultaneous translations. Here’s what he told TechCrunch TV in a 7-minute video interview. "If they're making strides in this valuable voice recognition area, I fear that Microsoft might have been sitting in their labs trying to innovate” over the past three years while "Apple was just used to cranking out the newest iPhone and falling a little behind and that worries me greatly. It worries me because I love Apple," Woz said. "It worries me if Apple were to lose ground because they were just making the same things they know how to make…Improving is not Apple-style innovation."

Retail roundup. Apple is planning to open its first store in Brazil in Rio de Janiero, but it hasn’t said when, according to reports in the Brazilian press…Apple makes about $6,050 for every square foot of store space, more than double that of Tiffany & Co.’s $3,017 return, according to a new study by research firm Retail Sails. That makes Apple the most valuable retailer in the U.S. for the second year in a row, according to All Things D, which got the full Retail Sails report. That’s not really surprising, given how busy Apple’s 376 stores (140 of which are outside the U.S. CFO Peter Oppenheimer said Apple “hosted 94 million visitors to our stores” last quarter, or an average of 19,000 visitors per store, per week. Now all Apple needs to do is find a new retail chief to replace John Browett, who was fired by Cook last month after less than a year on the job.

Here's to the crazy ones. So now we know that the movie Aaron Sorkin is writing about Steve Jobs, based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography, will be three, 30-minute scenes that all take place in real-time backstage at three big product announcements: the original Mac computer, the NeXT computer and the iPod. We know because that’s what Sorkin said in conversation with Tina Brown of Newsweek/The Daily Beast at the Hero Summit this week. “There’s no point in writing about someone unless they’re flawed,” Sorkin said. “I’ve been able to talk to people who revere him in spite of the fact that he made all of them cry. But he made all of them better at what they were doing.” Sorkin says he wants to end the movie with the voice-over and text from the famous “Think Apple” ads, which says“Here’s to the crazy ones.” What don’t we know about the movie now? Who they're going to cast as Jobs. Any guesses?